A few months after that Christmas in September, I embarked GeyserTimes.

Ramblings from behind the scenes

The 2016 Summer season has now come to a close in Yellowstone. We would like to thank everyone for using GeyserTimes. It is because of the people that come in data that makes this project as valuable as it is to the entire community.

Linked is a summary of the data that the community collected during this last summer.

Thanks for making GT what it is today!

We’ve been working on enhancements to GeyserTimes, mostly on the electronic data logger side of things, to help with collecting, analyzing and reporting on electronically monitored geysers. These include:

A fresh punchcard to demonstrate available data for data loggers.

Notes for data loggers

Extra admin data logger functions

I’m very excited that there have been two latest permits issued in Yellowstone to investigate geysers. I’m proud that GeyserTimes has been identified as a way to help make such data available to the public.

In non-data logger improvements, GeyserTimes now shows flagged eruptions with a flag icon on both the home page and individual geyser pages.

We just put some fresh features on the site tonight!

Initial to initial stats

Search bar behavior fix

Immobile a timezone issue on the data logger charts

Immobilized some problems with long usernames and their behavior in the header bar

Interval display – If two consecutive eruptions are entered in to the 2nd resolution the interval will display seconds

Some fixes and additions to the data logger management system

Cleaned up some old files

Liquidated v3 of the API. Please use v4.

For Your Information to anybody using our API. We will be turning off v3 very soon. Please make sure your scripts are using v4 of the API. This winter we will be working on a v5 of the API that will include more functions.

Information on how to use our API is listed at http://geysertimes.org/api/v4/docs/index.php

Released an update to the app that only switches some back end code to help reduce stress on the server.

Just a goes up. The main prediction server (geysers.net) for GeyserTimes is presently down. The server crashed and Alan has to rebuild the server that provided the predictions. In the meantime we have been working on a fresh prediction engine that will be hosted on our own server to eventually substitute the current server. The fresh system is not fully ready yet but we have released part of it so we will at least have predictions for Old Faithful. We hope to get the geysers.net prediction server and/ or the GeyserTimes prediction engine fully operational in the near future.

Released an update to the Android app that permits for a plain filter to hide all features that are not in Yellowstone from the summary screens. This setting is turned off by default so you will need to by hand turn it on if you only want to see features in Yellowstone.

Published an update today that fixes a bug that was causing a false error message when injecting Grand Geyser eruptions.

Immobile a bug on the sync adapter with the app that entries would not sync under a certain circumstance. Also added a rule to the duration parser so it will not parse any durations that contain a “/” until we get time to correctly treat those durations.

On April 15, 2011, GeyserTimes very first went live. It looked like this.

Since then, over 800,000 geyser eruption observations have been entered into the online database. A lot of features have been added over time including connecting to Alan Glennon’s geysers.net database, an Android App developed by Will Boekel that affords offline access to the data, and an application for archiving and viewing electronic temperature monitoring data.

Still, there are things I would like to do with GeyserTimes that I’ve been dreaming about since day 1. Predictions can be improved as well as data analysis devices.

Of course, GeyserTimes wouldn’t be such a success were it not for the community of gazers dutifully injecting information every time a geyser is observed erupting. Geyser gawping had long been a “crowd-sourcing” effort (on paper) before the phrase had even been coined. GeyserTimes has just been the internet-based, real-time, &lt,insert tech buzzword&gt, continuation of those decades of geyser gawping.

I’ll leave you with some print-outs that I received from Ralph Taylor in September 2010. I recall it fairly clearly. It was like Christmas morning for me when Ralph pulled up in his truck and gave me statistical evaluations of latest geyser activity (1 MB). (It was during a period of false Beehive’s Indicator eruptions so it was very helpful!) I couldn’t get enough of the stats and charts. Geysers bring two things I love together: Yellowstone and statistics. Ralph’s work proceeds to be an inspiration. A few months after that Christmas in September, I embarked GeyserTimes.